This project explores the expanding corpus of texts and artifacts inspired by Cirilo Villaverde's most well-known literary character, Cecilia Valdés. Drawing on adaptation studies and related transmedia approaches, the book examines how and why this iconographic complex, centered on the mytheme of a disaffected mulatta striving for a better life, has generated such a remarkably persistent proliferation of multi-media instantiations. Chapters address topics and themes central to the interests of Villaverde scholars as well as to Cubanists and Latin Americanists, more broadly, such as gender and sexual roles, race and hybridity, cultural and national identity, and, in general, colonial and post-colonial social contexts in Cuba.
